How to Add a Data Dashboard to WordPress

I’ve been doing some work for one of my clients to sum all of their digital headlines into an easy to view daily dashboard using Google Data Studio. My mission is to give an easy to read gauge of YouTube Subscribers, Views and Watch time, alongside Google Analytics website headlines and Mailchimp mailing list sign ups.

Google Data Studio

Google’s amazing new Data Studio product let’s you create displays of how your content and web views are performing in relation to each other. So many useful bits of information only become clear when you have this contrast. Non-Google products need a bit more work to wire in to Data Studio but many things can be accomplished by using Connectors to tap into API calls from your other platforms. Luckily there is good documentation and a Google Product Forum to ask/answer questions in.

Supermetrics

After an initial session linking in Google Analytics and YouTube configuring the way that I wanted to display some of the big numbers for my client, I tackled Mailchimp integration.

There’s quite a strong emerging market for Connectors which will give you access to other platforms, many are commercial but there are one or two community developed solutions. Whoever you choose, you do have to bear in mind you’ll be entering an API key so consideration should be given to the security of this. I went for the DIY Supermetrics integration (Not sure why this is so hard to find, so here’s the link to the Community Connectors Gallery). You don’t get any reports pre-configured but you do get all of the Mailchimp data points inside your Data Studio set up.

WordPress Dashboard

Now here’s the cool bit that really helps a client. I share loads of URL’s with my clients in a bid to give them access to useful information that will help them make decisions about how to evolve their business online – Google Analytics, Hotjar, Facebook Insights, Trello backlog lists, Adwords data, YouTube analytics – but I’m pretty sure that some of them get stuck at how to manage the bookmarks let alone having the time and inclination to view, interpret and digest all of the information.

Data Studio gives us a place to sum and connect all of the headline stats, and if your client website is running on WordPress you can add some code into your theme’s functions.php file which will let you embed not only a link but a (small) copy of your Data Studio report right where they live in the WP dashboard.

/** Custom Data Dashboard widget*/
add_action(‘wp_dashboard_setup’, ‘my_custom_dashboard_widgets’);

function my_custom_dashboard_widgets() { global $wp_meta_boxes;

wp_add_dashboard_widget(‘custom_help_widget’, ‘WG Coaching Data Dashboard’,
‘custom_dashboard_help’);
}
}}
function custom_dashboard_help() { echo ‘<p>YouTube and Google Analytics headline
statistics and graphs in your Data Studio dashboard.<br /><a
href=”https://datastudio.google.com”
target=”blank”>WG Coaching Data Dashboard</a> </p>;
}

There’s a great tutorial on WPBeginner that walks through creation of the widget. As well as the link to the Data Studio report, you can grab embed code and insert that into the widget too,  creating a nice easily clickable linked widget containing your clients headline stats.